Winter Camp [read: just kidding, we got heated cabins]

I have news! For those of you who don’t see me everyday, you don’t know that my life changed very much this January when I bit off way more than I can chew. I basically Elle Woods-ed it by becoming our university’s Panhellenic president. That means I look over the governing council that is comprised of all the sororities on campus, as its president. If you can’t tell, I’m excited.

A day in the life of a Panhellenic president pretty much involves a lot of meetings and the major meeting of this month is called Fraternity & Sorority Life Summit. It takes place on Cape Cod, a place very near and dear to my heart. It’s at the same YMCA camp that my sorority uses in the fall for Kamp Kappa, great hashtag. Every time I head over to Camp Burgess & Hayward, I realize it’ll be a somewhat difficult weekend. I’m not very good with the outdoors, and we know this because of the concussion from walking, the brown recluse spider bite before prom (great story, will actually tell it at parties, thanks), and my fear of monkey bars. Cabins? That’s just a whole new level of ‘not Sneha’ that everyone gets to watch me go through.

Enter camp.

Every year at Kamp Kappa, my sister Christy comes and kills the spiders in the showers so I can take a shower. When she doesn’t kill the spiders, I don’t take a shower, and that haphazardly solves the problem (sorry cabin-mates). Luckily, Christy came this year to Summit as our sorority’s president (!!!) so she can resume her real position as official spider-killer this weekend.

Coincidentally, there was also this major winter storm that ought to appear sometime on Saturday. My feelings about that: How did the spiders team up with the snow to make this the most hellish weekend of all time? Oh, the conspiracy is real. The hype? Not so real.

Enter blizzard. Is this Christmas?

But, really, it was all under control. It was actually #summLIT, as the presidents called it. We all became (not casually) best friends, and spent time playing ’90s trivia, Mafia (I got to be God~*~) and making a snowman. We arrived late Friday night, had some pretty funny ice breakers (it turns out that someone else’s prom date was voted most attractive too? #humblebrag) and made it to our condo-like cabins. Seriously, they were heated, it’s like we were actually at a retreat for once.

The next morning, bright and early, we started our leadership programming at 8 A.M. and went on until 11 P.M. with team-building exercises, breakout sessions, and lots of fruit snacks. They rationed them (they being ‘the man’) so we could share. Doing silly activities with everyone at the same time is just really fun. Yeah I want the challenge of crossing this hypothetical river and building a path collectively to get across without drowning! That’s how I feel about leadership.

After the crazy long day that felt like 3 weeks, we had an impromptu dance party and ran out into the snow (the blizzard hit the Cape real bad) and I claimed my first victim of the snowball fight. He may have been surrendering, but that is no excuse. Afterwards, the girls’ cabin decided to ambush the boys’ cabin at 1:30 A.M. for a snowball fight (we got ’em!) and it ended when they started shoveling at us. Rude. It really was just like summer camp in the winter. Winter camp.

Site of the snowball massacre. Obviously, Panhellenic won. Obviously. Right?

The next morning, we got breakfast and debriefed the entire weekend with photos and sentimentality. One of my vice presidents said she loved us about 14 times, and I think she’s crying somewhere reading this. It was an incredible experience, making this many friends this quickly, and keeping up with it when we got back to campus. We may have been exhausted, but all the presidents attended our Panhellenic meeting and sat together, leading by example and showing their chapter members that you can have friendships across chapters because we’re all on the same team. Real happy for that. It really is #summLIT.

Executive Board! On the far right is my advisor, Emily, who definitely fits right in as a collegiate sorority member though she graduated years ago. Goals.Sharon (front middle) is already so happy she’s crying. Classic Sharon.